Friday, July 12, 2013

Links

Hannah Nordhaus, author of The Beekeeper’s Lament, warned that the scare stories evoked by CCD should serve as a cautionary tale to environmental journalists. “By engaging in simplistic and sometimes misleading environmental narratives—by exaggerating the stakes and brushing over the inconvenient facts that stand in the way of foregone conclusions­­—we do our field, and our subjects, a disservice,” she wrote in her 2011 essay “An Environmental Journalist’s Lament.”

But there sometimes is not much difference between being ahead of the pack and simply being out in left field. If there was a truly united sense among Americans that the nation was under an existential threat and climate change was the culprit, President Obama’s rhetoric would fit the national mood and history might go his way. But I fear what we are witnessing is instead the desperate actions of a leader who wants to force his vision of the future on a public that is unwilling to pay the high price for a dubious honor that may not come for generations, if ever.